The unbearable weight of Shinzo Abe

Uncertain times, and even a political bouleversement is not out of the question

AS THE up-and-coming politician sat down to dinner, he asked if it was at all obvious he had been wearing make-up. He then quickly explained that he had just come from having his photograph taken for a campaign poster. What on earth for? The elections due on July 29th are for half of the 242 seats in the upper house of the Diet (parliament), for which the campaign officially began this week. Yet this politician from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) holds a seat in the lower house, won in the 2005 landslide when voters backed the reformist agenda of Junichiro Koizumi, the maverick prime minister of the time. The poster, the politician replied, was a sensible precaution. He and many of his colleagues had privately concluded that so low are the fortunes of the current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, that he may yet call a snap general election on the same day as the upper-house polls.

The dinner was just before the latest fiasco for Mr Abe's administration. Over the weekend his defence minister, Fumio Kyuma, made remarks that appeared to justify the United States' dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war, killing over 200,000 civilians. Never mind that Mr Kyuma's analysis is shared by some mainstream historians: that the bombs hastened Japan's surrender, so denying the Soviet Union a massive land-grab of the northern half of Japan. Mr Kyuma trod on hallowed ground that, uniquely, unites the politics of Japan's right and left: for historical revisionists and anti-war pacifists alike, the horror of the atom bombs marks Japan for ever as victim.

Unhappily for Mr Abe, Mr Kyuma's constituency is in Nagasaki. There the LDP is fighting the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) for an upper-house seat. It is on the southern island of Kyushu, traditionally a conservative bastion. But the LDP's electoral machine is now weakened, and the outcome of the race is in doubt. Mr Kyuma resigned on July 3rd.

Three ministers have now gone during Mr Abe's nine months in office, including a suicide. A fourth, Hakuo Yanigisawa, the health and welfare minister, is certain to go. Not only has he outraged Japanese women by referring to them as “birth-giving machines”, but he oversees a pensions agency which has admitted to losing 50m pensions records. This pensions fiasco, more than anything, is what has undermined Mr Abe's fortunes. On July 2nd a poll in the Asahi Shimbun showed approval ratings for his government fall below 30% for the first time, down by more than half since he took office.

To keep an upper-house majority, the LDP had counted on its coalition partner, New Komeito, holding the 12 of its existing seats that are being contested, while winning at least 52 itself. But now New Komeito is alarmed at being tainted by the LDP's woes. Soka Gakkai, the 8m-household-strong Buddhist organisation behind the party, with a pacifist streak, was one of the first to call for Mr Kyuma's resignation.

Should Mr Abe find himself a few seats short, he might be able to persuade two or three from the DPJ to jump the aisle, and, bizarrely, he might strike a deal with the tiny People's New Party. It is made up of anti-Koizumi former LDP members, and wants Alberto Fujimori, a former Peruvian president now in exile in Chile, to run from there as a candidate in one district. In theory Mr Abe can stumble on without a majority: the lower house, which the LDP coalition controls, picks the prime minister.

If the loss is big enough to force Mr Abe's resignation, though, things get interesting. The likeliest outcome would be a race to lead the LDP and hence the country. Probable contenders are Taro Aso, the foreign minister, and Sadakazu Tanigaki, a former finance minister, both leaders of small factions. Yet the former shares the conservative agenda that has done Mr Abe few favours, and the latter favours an early tax hike, which is hardly popular with voters. So a younger challenger may come forward, such as Nobuteru Ishihara, the LDP's deputy secretary-general.

A bigger loss, and it becomes more likely that the LDP will choose a caretaker leader and then call a general election. But there is another possibility, says the LDP politician with the make-up: a one-in-five chance of a shock to Japan's political system that smashes the main parties as they are currently constituted and remakes them into something wholly new.

He points out that for all the LDP's troubles, the DPJ has proved inept at profiting from them. The party is a collection of unlikely bedfellows from right and left. Its leader, Ichiro Ozawa, an increasingly ineffectual bully who spent most of his career in the LDP, dismays younger reformists in his party. These huddle with LDP members, the cosmetically enhanced politician included, who resent the resurgence under Mr Abe of grubby factional politics and backbenchers with the power to thwart market-oriented policy. Modernisers in both parties tend also to support a more muscular role for Japan abroad, which means revising the pacifist constitution. So they talk of uniting to form a party based on policy more than personality, while the reactionary rumps of the LDP and the DPJ, along with New Komeito, become the grumpy old opposition.

Fanciful? Certainly, and it has been imagined before. But in volatile times, imaginings sometimes come true.